Dear all

good to see that the notion of study skills is (again) receiving some overdue questioning. But I think we need to go further than 'study skills'. It's the whole notion of skills that needs to be questioned, as **any** notion should be questioned as part of intellectual enquiry.
Gilbert Ryle made the useful distinction between technical and untechnical concepts. Clearly the term 'skill' is used as an untechnical concept in our everyday, mundane conversation. But once we start to use the term in **technical** discourse, problems quickly arise.

One key way in which our thinking goes astray is the use of possessive language - we talk of 'acquiring' and 'having' skills - and the use of language of tool-usage - as if skills have some empirical existence.

Yet clearly the term 'skill' does not refer to (denote) an empirical object - we can't locate skills **within** any human person (although perhaps some naive interpreters of neuroscience seem to think we can - much to neuroscientists' annoyance!).

So we need to put aside the implicit possessive-instrumentalist understanding that accompanies the 'skills' talk, and enquire more seriously about what is going on when, in the current case, students do (or do not) become better (whatever that might mean!) at engaging in their studies. That requires a much more sophisticated theoretical framework than is offered by the skills approach.

I have argued that the twin concepts of identity and practices provides for such a framework. Sandra stated that she had found that "sessions that students engage in voluntarily or at least willingly can be experienced as transformative". This would seem to me to be understandable in terms of identity - the students in question aspiring to the identity of a (successful) undergraduate (at whatever level, first year, second, finalist), so commiting time, efforts etc to achieving that.

The various terms used in lists of so-called study skills may be viewed as linguistic repertoires for the practices appropriate to those who are positioned in particular identities (students), within particular social settings (undergraduate - or postgraduate - higher education courses).

Instead of being mystified by being told that they must acquire/ develop this or that set of 'study skills', students might then be helped by being encouraged to recognise that, in order to achieve their desired identity, they need to engage in certain identifiable sorts of practices. It's what they should **do**, not **have**; and if they are not good at 'doing it' at first, then practise (with guidance, examples, etc) will enable them to get better.


regards

Len

-------------------------

Dr Leonard Holmes
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University of Roehampton | London | SW15 5PJ
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From: learning development in higher education network [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rooney, Stephen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 June 2013 17:44
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?

Dear all,

Now would seem like a good time to remind people that Gibbs contributed a lengthier, and similarly themed, piece to the inaugural edition of the always fascinating and stimulating Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education:

http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=issue&op=view&path%5B%5D=8

All best,

Steve

From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Diana Aronstam
Sent: 03 June 2013 17:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?

This piece is indeed very helpful, and articulates the issues very clearly. Gibbs has been critiquing the study skills model since the 70s and, if my memory serves me correctly, drew attention in the early 80s to the (then) groundbreaking  ‘phenomenographic’ approach of the Goteborg Group, led by Marton. They too provided a robust critique of this model, and their perspectives were transformational for me in relation to my understanding of effective learning in higher education.

Many thanks, Gordon.

Diana


Diana Aronstam
London College of Fashion

From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of M. Gough
Sent: 03 June 2013 16:22
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?

I am new to this list (hello all!)
This encompasses so much of what I have found and have been trying to convince others of so it is very helpful.
Thank you for sharing

Mandy

(Kingston university)




________________________________
From: Janette Myers <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, 3 June 2013, 15:32
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?

Thanks for circulating this Gordon. I thought it a very positive piece, making some succinct key points. It will be of use to me in supporting some of the things I try to convey about embedding, metacognition and the non-remedial (and transformative Sandra!) nature of LD
regards
Janette

On 03/06/2013 13:11, Gordon Asher wrote:
Raising awareness of best-practice pedagogy
30 MAY 2013
Graham Gibbs asks what ‘study skills’ consist of and whether they can actually be learned by students
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/raising-awareness-of-best-practice-pedagogy/2004204.article
SOURCE: ALAMY<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/raising-awareness-of-best-practice-pedagogy/2004204.article>
Tunnel vision: giving students ‘how-to’ guides to learning does not encourage the kind of flexible thinking that is required to get the most out of higher education
When I was at The Open University in the 1970s, I tried to teach adults who were studying for the first time in their lives what they needed to do in order to learn ­effectively. When I was based at Oxford ­Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) in the 1980s, I was teaching students whose study habits had got them through their A levels but were ­unequal to the larger and more ­complex tasks of higher education. And when I later worked at the University of Oxford, students were still asking for help with “study skills”. Their intelligence and achievements were intimidating, so what was the ­problem?
The educational interventions that make most difference to student performance are not to do with improving teachers or curricula, and certainly not with policy or organisational changes, but involve improving students: changing what it is they do in order to learn. For example, teachers can often help students more by encouraging them to tackle feedback differently than by altering the feedback itself.
So what does “improving ­students” actually consist of? “How to” guides on study skills – how to take notes, how to structure an essay and so on – contain what appears to be sound enough advice (although the similarity between them is both striking and s­uspicious).
However, attempts to back up this consensus with evidence of the effectiveness of the techniques described have had little success. Students’ scores on “study habits inventories” – questionnaires made up of lists of the kinds of things contained in these books – hardly correlate with examination performance at all. An exception is how to be organised (by managing one’s time, for example). “Organisation” predicts performance where the use of most “skills” does not.
Students also rarely use the methods they read about in how-to-study books or are taught on study skills courses, and for all kinds of reasons. Most importantly, the skills may be too rigid to span the range of demands that students actually face.
For example, lectures may primarily convey facts, or explain procedures, or exemplify the use of the discourse of the discipline, and so on. Each requires a different kind of note-taking, and students have to be able to spot these varied demands and do something different in response, not simply use the same methods every time. Disciplines also vary in their demands and conventions: a student studying sociology and history may find that their ­writing gains good marks in one but not the other.
Fit for purpose
It appears that successful students (and successful academics for that matter) do an extraordinary variety of things when they take notes or set about writing. They have found, often through trial and error, idiosyncratic ways that work well enough for them, given their purposes and the particular learning tasks in front of them.
It is possible to train students to use specific technical skills, but they transfer very poorly from one context to another (for example, from a training course back to everyday study, or from studying one subject to another). It is much better, instead, to develop a learner’s ability to study a subject within that subject.
For example, efforts at some Ivy League universities to improve students’ writing by hiring experts in communication who run generic courses in how to write have tended to be abandoned. Instead, postgraduates within subjects are trained to give feedback on assignments that leads students to reflect on their writing, rather than only on the content of the ­assignment.
When I acted as a “study skills counsellor” at Oxford Polytechnic, I noticed that many of the bewildered students in my caseload were unable to describe what they did when they were ­studying (such as reading a chapter in a book, for example). Their ­studying was habitual and unreflective. In contrast, effective students can tell you all about how they go about their task, have a sensible rationale for doing so and change what they do when they notice that the context or task demands are ­different.
In the educational literature, this is termed “metacognitive awareness and control”, and it is the most influential of all aspects of “study skills”. Improving students appears to involve raising their awareness of what they are doing, increasing their repertoire so that they can choose to do different things when it seems appropriate and tuning them in to task demands so that they can recog­nise what is required.
Right answer, wrong approach
Two crucial aspects of studying effectively are not about “skills” at all but about understanding. Research at Harvard University into why its very bright students sometimes study in unintelligent ways has revealed how important it is for ­students to understand the nature of knowledge and what they are ­supposed to do with it.
The study found that unsophisticated students would try to spot the right answers in ­lectures, which they would note down in order to memorise for a test, a method described in the literature by the phrase “quantitative accretion of discrete rightness”. They were fantas­tically efficient at this and it had served them well at school, but it was the wrong thing to do at ­Harvard.
Similarly, studies at the University of Gothenburg have revealed that students have quite different conceptions of what “learning” means, and these conceptions evolved through experience until, ideally, learning is seen as attempting to “apprehend reality”.
Skills have to serve the purposes associated with these evolving concep­tions of knowledge and of learning: without appropriate ­purposes, the skills can be worse than useless.
PRINT HEADLINE:
Article originally published as: Self-reflective improvement (30 May 2013)
AUTHOR:
Graham Gibbs is professor of higher education at the University of Winchester.



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